Modern Rogue is a direct successor to Hacking the System, which lasted for two specials and one full season on cable television. Hosted by Brian Brushwood and Jason Murphy, Modern Rogue is centered around the idea that two middle-age dudes can explore any topic generally considered cool as hell, often to humorous ends with mixed success in the subject at hand.

Brian Brushwood and Jason Murphy, professional idiots, field test the things that will make you the most interesting person in the room.

Contents

A Quest to Independence

Despite the property never being owned by a network, it did take some time for Modern Rogue to properly exist on its own.

To gauge interest and viability for the show existing outside of the already established Scam School brand, the first episode was released as a pilot under the Scam Stuff channel, which at the time was also in a nascent state. Amassing 45,000 views in the first week of launch, the test showed optimistic potential but wasn't up to the level that a particularly well-performing Scam School of the time might see. From this point onward, Modern Rogue started publishing through the Scam School channel, while outtakes were kept on the Scam Stuff channel.

The second episode launched on the Scam School channel with a 280% increase over the first, at an opening week of 111,500 views. The series continued publishing through the Scam School channel, a couple of which broke past the one million view mark, but starting with episode 31 (Sep 2016) all subsequent episodes would be released on the official Modern Rogue channel. The departure from the Scam School brand was discussed internally for months beforehand with many points for and against, there was even a brief period of time when consideration was put into possibly pushing the show back to the Scam Stuff channel, but starting from the ground up and allowing the property to develop its own audience proved the healthiest long-term option.

Brand Growth

In July of 2017, the Modern Rogue Patreon was launched in an effort to turn the show profitable. This resulted in behind the scenes material and a variety of rewards exclusive to patrons. Over time, the additional resources from the Patreon campaign have allowed closed captions to be provided for every video from MR148 (Nov 2018) onward, new camera equipment, 4K videos, and the development of Modern Rogue HQ.

Article Branch

On January 22nd, 2018, it was announced that former Cracked editor John Cheese would become editor-in-chief of the Modern Rogue website, which was being re-designed to accommodate daily articles. After reports of misconduct and abuse of his position of power at his previous employment, he was fired on September 24, 2018. Dwayne Hoover became the new editor-in-chief of the article division.